TPM Limited amongst other things is a print and web archiving company, and on several occasions we have had a need to go beyond simple PDF creation and into the realms of complicated PDF manipulation to deliver solutions to our customers.

We first started using ABCpdf by webSupergoo in 2007 when we had a requirement for producing books from disparate PDF's supplied to us by our customer, these PDF's covered various aspects regarding properties for sale in the UK. The PDF's were generated by various organisation carrying out inspections and audits of the property in question. They needed to be taken and composited into books with covers, indexes and section divider pages etc, all of which had to be produced with a pre-defined style our customer specified in the data sent to us. The books could be delivered either in a printed form or electronically via email and web archive access or on CD.

Our initial requirements were:

1> A tool to allow us to extract pages from within a PDF file as .EMF files for use within a VB.NET print app for producing the physical books.

2> A tool to allow us to build a PDF by compositing the supplied PDF's and content generated by our production application (covers/section dividers etc) into a single PDF for electronic delivery.

3> A tool to allow us to insert elements into the existing supplied PDF pages such as barcode images and page numbers.

After looking at various tools available we settled on ABCpdf as it seemed to cover everything we needed as well having additional functionality that we considered would be useful on future projects. We have since used it in several other book production and archiving related projects for our customers and see it as an essential tool giving us powerful and cost effective PDF manipulation capabilities from within our custom written production applications.